The essence of high-end watchmaking, haute horlogerie, lies in complications
It’s Complicated
Mechanical watches are just fancy hourglasses, really. Instead of fine sand trickling from one glass chamber to the next, they have fine springs that unwind and, in the process, rotate hands on the dial.
But people don’t plonk down $10,000, $100,000 or even $1 million to buy handmade mechanical watches just so they can tell the time. Fact is, on accuracy and reliability, mass-produced battery-operated quartz watches beat the Swiss — the acknowledged supreme masters of watchmaking for at least three centuries — over three decades ago.
Shorn of the burden of competing with quartz on accuracy, Swiss watchmakers realised what they were selling wasn’t really time. It was art.
The essence of haute horlogerie (high-end watchmaking), is in its “complications” — which, simply put, are mechanisms that do more than just tell the hours, minutes or seconds. Some are, at least on the surface, straightforward: Calendars, second time zone or moon phase. Others, like the tourbillon, require basic horlogerie knowledge just to understand.
Simple or complex, behind each of them lie tens, even hundreds of tiny mechanical parts — springs, wheels, levers, gears, jewels — created and assembled with minute precision over hundreds of hours by highly trained watchmakers who learned their craft over years.
Most complications have been around for decades, even centuries. All that differentiates one watchmaker from another is the quality of execution.
Take for instance the tourbillon, said to be invented in 1795 by Abraham-Louis Bréguet (who founded the luxury watchmaker Bréguet) to help pocket watches counter the effects of gravity. Acknowledged to be amongst the toughest of complications, it requires years of training to understand and months to construct. (It’s quite another matter that many watch historians and scientifically-inclined watch lovers think the whole gravity thing was more of an imaginary problem and tourbillons their imaginary answer.)
Essentially a way to package the escapement (which converts the continuous rotational unwinding of the mainspring into to-and-fro motion) and balance wheel (the heart of a mechanical watch, which oscillates tens of thousands of times an hour to measure time) into a single assembly that can then be rotated constantly, the tourbillon today is the centrepiece of any watch it occupies, not just an error-correcting device.
Bréguet’s tourbillon rotated on one axis; watchmakers today have created tourbillons that spin on three. Thomas Prescher, an independent watchmaker who started making his own watches from Twann in Switzerland only in 2002 has, for instance, created “flying” tourbillons (supported from only one side, they give the illusion that they are suspended in air) that operate on three axes.
Well-known brands usually prefer to play it safe, content with creating minor variations of established designs instead of taking big risks with new complications. It is boutique watchmakers, independents like Prescher, who are creating complications that are stretch the limits of what watches can do.
Connoisseurs too are increasingly drawn to independent watchmakers. Perhaps they realise that the money they pay for their watches — ten thousand dollars and way, way upwards — nurtures and supports talented watchmakers instead of paying for advertising campaigns, celebrity endorsements or posh retail outlets.
Besides, buyers of big-brand watches have a need that is fundamentally different from what the connoisseurs want. The former want designs that are instantly recognisable, giving them the cachet of the brand. The collectors wants uniqueness.
This frees independent watchmakers from the constraints of past designs, mass appeal or economies of scale, and expands the boundaries of watchmaking. Finding a well-crafted tourbillon or minute repeater from an extremely talented independent can be for many collectors the equivalent of investing in a Subodh Gupta (while he was still unknown) instead of an assistant-produced Damien Hirst.
This is why the complications we have chosen are all from independent watchmakers (Thomas Prescher, Urwerk, Maîtres du Temps, Rebellion, Christophe Claret) and one boutique brand that isn’t in every duty-free (de Grisogono). The complications that lie within the six watches also eschew mere reinterpretation of existing complications in favour of creating ones that truly push the boundaries of aesthetics, skill and art.
Barrel of Fun
T-1000 by Rebellion
Price: upwards of $100,000
Many Hands Make Watch
Chapter One (Red Gold/Silver Dial) by Maîtres du Temps
Price: $300,000 – 350,000
(This story appears in the 13 August, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)